Adolf Hitler bears direct responsibility for the deaths of more than
thirty million people, most of them killed between 1939 and 1945. Born
in Braunau, on the border between the multi-ethnic empire of
Austria-Hungary and the German Reich, his political ideas originated in
the racist radicalism of his homeland, a racism he digested whilst he
was a young man in Vienna, trying unsuccessfully to enter art school.

He moved Munich in 1913, where he enlisted in the German army. He was
twice wounded, and decorated, during World War One. His political career
began in 1918, fired by loathing for the German revolution of 1918/19
and the Weimar Republic, which he (and countless others) regarded as
symbolic of Germany's defeat in the war and of the illegitimate 'power
of Jews and Bolsheviks'.

In 1919 he joined the fascist German Workers' Party (DAP), whilst still
employed by the German army as a propagandist. Demonstrating rare talent
as a rabble-rouser, he played to the resentments of right-wingers,
promising extremist 'remedies' to Germany's problems, including the
killing of Jews, which few believed would ever be enacted. By July 1921
he was the unquestioned leader of what had become the NSDAP, the Nazi
Party.

In 1923 Hitler attempted an armed uprising in Munich (along the lines of
Mussolini's 1922 march on Rome), but this collapsed, and he was put
behind bars for nine months. In 1925 he re-founded the party as a
vote-winning machine, its core ideas intact, in an attempt to use
democracy as the means of its own destruction. Using new techniques of
mass communication to project his own quirky charisma, and backed by the
brutality of his storm troopers, he pounded with his rhetoric the west,
the Soviets, democrats, communists, capitalists and Jews. At this time
of rural economic depression, the 1929 crash, and mass unemployment,
voters were in the right frame of mind to move his way, and by 1932 the
Nazis could no longer be ignored by Germany's political lites.

Although his party never won an overall majority in Germany, on 30
January 1933 Hitler became chancellor of a coalition government. Many
believed power would 'tame' him, but the descent into the hell of the
Third Reich was rapid. By 1938 radicalism, terror, expansionism had
become the norm, and many Germans tolerated the situation - with fear
and propaganda being partial explanations for this acceptance.

Hitler sought world domination (he always took war to his enemies, not
they to him), and his policies led inexorably to World War Two. His
murderous racial and political intentions were always clear, although
secrecy sometimes shrouded the precise means of their execution. He
killed himself in Berlin in 1945.

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